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The Castle
Contents |
THE CASTLE’S EXTERIOR 
Edit
The center of the world of Paradisa is Cair Paradisa, the Infinite Fortress. Most residents have come to know the castle itself as Paradisa, though a few of the older residents still call it Cair Paradisa. The title “Infinite Fortress” is entirely lost to the residents. The castle stands on a hill, overlooking the City Royale.
The exterior makes the castle look very large, but it’s much bigger still on the inside. The architecture is altogether impossible to describe; while it borrows styles from various different cultures, both recognizable and unrecognizable, it doesn’t follow any particular rule of design, yet it manages to look stunning and ethereally beautiful to all. It’s all made of pale gold stone with dark tiled rooftops, and all the windows.
The inside doesn’t appear to follow the same scheme as the exterior; windows on the outside don’t always match up with windows on the inside, and despite there being several towers and turrets, there doesn’t seem to be any way to access some of them. There are more floors on the inside than there are on the outside, and sometimes some of the higher floors are larger than the ones below it.
When damaged, the castle repairs itself over a matter of minutes, hours or days, depending on what’s going on at the time.
THE CASTLE’S INTERIOR Edit
Overview Edit
Most of the halls are done with familiar castle-gray stone walls, rich hardwood paneling and ornate stained-glass windows. All ceilings are richly detailed and vaulted, even in the halls, even where the floor above generally wouldn’t allow it. The floors and staircases are all marble, and the bannisters are elegant dark wood. Again, everything seems to have been designed with a specific style or architecture in mind, but it is entirely unplaceable.
There are twenty bedrooms on each floor above the first, and there are seemingly infinite floors; whenever a new floor full of rooms is needed, it just appears.
Residents’ Rooms Edit
Residents begin with a default room, one fit for kings and queens. The default room comes with huge soft beds covered with silk sheets and velvet bedspreads, and elegant furnishings, consisting mainly of a large mirrored dresser, a freestanding wardrobe, an end table, and a desk with a chair. The wardrobes contain clothing that the residents do not recognize as ever having owned, but which fits them and matches their tastes in style and colors perfectly. Each room has its own attached bathroom containing, among other things, a giant marble bathtub. When residents arrive in Paradisa, they will usually wake up in their bed or else simply be in their bedroom without any idea how they got there.
Residents can redecorate their rooms as time goes by, with help from the castle, which is usually compliant enough to give them anything they ask for, as long as it does not interfere with their current loss. Some residents keep the expensive hotel look to their rooms, while others modify them to the point of looking like exact replicas of their rooms back home.
Rooms can change size and shape as necessary, stretching to be the size of a huge sprawling apartment, or shrinking to be a humble little single room.
On each resident's door is a nameplate engraved with their name. Some residents have been known to alter, change or remove theirs; however, as the nameplate is used by most residents as a record of who is still living in Paradisa, residents like it when others leave their nameplates untouched.
Rooms are soundproof (to the normal human ear), so unless the door or journal is open, nothing can be heard out of them. Sometimes, however, for jokes, the castle likes to remove this magical soundproofing. If a resident suddenly hears their neighbour's obnoxiously loud activities, it's because the castle is allowing it, for whatever reason.
Public Rooms Edit
The following rooms have unrestricted public access, and are where the majority of the residents spend their time, when in the castle.
THE LOBBY
An elaborate and beautiful room with the sweeping grand staircase and glass elevators, as well as Paradisa’s front doors. The crystal chandelier is large enough that it would take four normal men to lift it. The lobby is mostly open space, though there are a few couches and coffee tables set up.
POOL
An Olympic sized pool. There are changing rooms, towels, and showers for your pleasure. There's also a sauna in one corner, and a hot tub in the opposite one. Found on the first floor.
THE GAME ROOM
A game room. It has any game imaginable, including DDR, arcade games, and separate sections for billiards and cards. The entrance is found on the eighth floor.
THE MUSIC ROOM
A room containing any instrument imaginable and endless resources of music. The staple of the room is the large white baby grand piano. The ceilings are vaulted for better sound. The entrance is found on the third floor.
THE GYM
A fully equipped gym for any activities a castle resident may want to engage in. Found on the twelfth floor.
A clinic set up by the healers/medics of the castle. It includes full medical facilities, as well as blood packets usually reserved for the friendlier vampires. It also contains a wall mural painted by Henry Townshend and Kio of a full-color Eden. The entrance is on the second floor.
THE KITCHEN
One of the biggest kitchens imaginable; it has everything needed to make a meal. It also includes a pantry, as well as ghosts that will make almost anything you request. While ghosts will make the residents whatever they want to eat or drink in a fraction of the time it would take to make the food normally, residents are also free to cook for themselves. The pantry, freezer and refrigerator are fully stocked with anything anyone might need or want. All the equipment in the kitchens is on par with modern-day technology, which might come as a surprise to residents who have never seen a gas range before. The microwave is often the most abused appliance in the kitchen. Iconically located on the first floor.
THE LIBRARY
Enormous three-story library with books on practically anything, including the histories of the home worlds of various residents. It does not, however, have anything on Paradisa itself, nor anything on the current events of any world. If the characters need to research something or simply want something to read, they will never be at a loss. There are entrances on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors.
DINING HALL
More formal than the kitchen; a giant, elegant dining hall with a very long table and high-backed chairs.
BALLROOM
A giant ballroom, usually decorated in whichever theme the castle desires for a special occasion, or how a resident wishes. It is the location for the Host Club’s events, once a month or so.
Special Rooms Edit
Paradisa is also home to a few special rooms. They may be deemed special either because they are not open on a daily basis, or because they are owned and operated by castle residents, and thus may have policed access.
THE THEATRE
Behind a door on the seventh floor is a staircase leading down, up and then sideways to a large room with a giant movie screen and comfortable armchairs arranged in lines. Every other wall is covered in shelving units full of movies. Only open on Friday or Saturday nights; all other nights, the door just vanishes.
A bizarre room; it appears to be available to give residents a break from whatever the current weather is. The door is found on the tenth floor. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the door opens up and one appears to be walking out of a beach tent into a large, expansive room with beach murals painted all around. The ground is sand, and half the space is taken up by ocean. The water is just as deep as your average beach, but eventually you’ll hit the wall. On Mondays and Fridays when the door is opened you're greeted with a white tundra of snow. The water is frozen thick enough to ice skate, is large enough to also allow Hockey, and even has fish deep beneath the surface for ice fishing. There is a giant sledding hill as well.
Originally opened by Lucifer himself, the Lux is a piano bar/restaurant operated by castle residents and located on the first floor. The order of ownership has been Lucifer, Fay, Sakura, Uru, Chris, Saetan, and Zora. Currently, it is owned by Eliot Spencer.
THE DEATH MATCH
A general bar, opened and currently operated by Travis Touchdown. The Death Match is home to a strange little crew of regulars and, occasionally, troublemakers. It is the best place to go to vent if you don’t have a Danger Room key, although there are rules in place. Generally not open to those below drinking age, but sometimes they slip past the radar. Located on the second floor.
A large tower on the east side of the castle, it was created by Sephiroth and Kyuzo. Within are detailed maps of the castle and city, as well as a rather large mirror. It has recently been taken over by the Leverage team, and is the location of the Leverage Headquarters.
A room that appeared overnight, the laundry room is nothing short of odd. Three washing machines with three dryers to match the laundry room is energy efficient and there to be used by the castle residents. Open 24/7 it's there for those times when you don't trust a ghost to do your delicates. No one knows what the point of this room is, as the castle never seemed to need a laundry room before to do laundry...
INSOLITUS
A bizarre room on the eleventh floor that is very much like an indoor children's playground, albeit in dark, natural colours. The nameplate says "Insolitus" in embossed letters, and opening the door reveals a small room with three large holes in the wall, just large enough for a grown man to crawl through. These holes lead to a HUGE mass of weaving tunnels and tubes lit by thousands of tiny white lights, like stars. The tunnels link up with ladders, staircases, ramps, platforms and open bridges, sometimes through open air with no apparent bottom, and sometimes through closed spaces. It seems to span at least a few stories, and it goes very deep. Whatever this is, it seems to be important.
The Roof Edit
Accessible from the stairwell from the fifteenth floor, and divided into two sections.
The first section, and the most commonly used, is the one with the balcony, safe for all the walk on, with high railings. It is not quiet as high as the other section, and is in fact just under it, but it is a comfortable place to rest and think. It is usually quiet, and the walkway stretches around three sides of the castle. A ladder is on the far end, up the side of the tallest tower and allowing access to the upper tier of the roof.
The upper tier is not so safe, as it is tiled and heavily slanted, but some of the more daring residents may come up here. Other than the top of the tower, it is the highest accessible place in the known area, unless you can fly higher.
The Basement Edit
Accessible only by elevator, the basement is a long hall, dimly lit. It leads to a set of double doors, with the sign “CLUB HEL” above it. It is no longer open, but the doors are left unlocked. This is what used to be a club, created by the Merovingian.
The layout is of five rooms roughly encircling an invite-only chamber with glass walls called Room Zero. When the Merovingian left Paradisa it was handed off to Ruby, but she too has left, leaving it out of order and abandoned.
The Peace Patrol is currently renovating it for use as a headquarters, under Tony Stark’s direction.
Utilities Edit
The castle has both running water and electricity. It also has vents for air circulation. Electrical outlets only appear when they are needed or wanted, and they can appear anywhere on the wall.
It is usually tepid in the castle, though in the summer it gets hotter. There are no visible heating vents.
If one were to expose the pipes, wires and ducts or look at them through the walls, they would be unable to map the entire system. They don’t seem to go anywhere efficiently and they are irregular and almost random in organization; sometimes they zigzag or meander around before going where they are supposed to go. Sometimes they just stop nowhere and sometimes wires don't even reach the outlets. It's almost as if whoever designed it didn't bother to fill in all the details, and just wanted to make it LOOK real.
Finding the source is impossible; in the end they all just head straight down into the ground, so deep that no one can see where they’re going. It’s assumed there’s a generator and whatnot down there, but no one’s ever bothered to look into it... nor do they necessarily have the resources to.
Pipes and ducts also seem to change size in certain spots; sometimes they are thin enough that you’d be hard pressed to put a pencil through them, but other times they are big enough that a grown man could comfortably crawl around in there. Even stranger is that sound seems to be nullified inside them.
The GROUNDS Edit
The castle has huge, lush grounds, filled with fruit orchards and gardens and small, quaint woods. The grounds have a timeless, beautiful quality to them, and the flowers and gardens never seem to wilt or decay. No matter what season it is, the grounds look picture-perfect, like the set of a movie; the lawns never need to be mowed, the bushes and shrubs never need trimming, and there’s never any debris. In the winter, the snow is always looks like a scene from a Christmas card, and there’s never any mud or slush in the spring.
There’s extremely little in the way of insect life or wildlife; everything seems to exist out of coincidence or necessity. There are never any bees pollinating the perfect flowers, or songbirds singing, or animals in the forest unless a resident stops to notice them. One of the only animals who exist all the time are the ducks in the duck pond. The duck pond is a well-known part of the castle, as well as the only body of water accessible on a regular basis. However, it's very small, and only about four feet deep at its deepest point.
There are several other significant buildings on the grounds, some more hidden then others. Further details are as follows:
THE DANGER ROOM
In the woods, down a fairly well-hidden path, there’s a building somewhere, built by Pyro and Hiro. The Danger Room is only accessible through keycard, and it is made of materials quite impossible to break in or out of. The inside acts as a virtual reality that can put the user into any situation they program. With the original creators gone, it can only be entered by obtaining a keycard. Clark Kent has made enough copies of the card key to distribute to all the residents.
ONSEN
A public hot springs built by Yamato. From the outside, it seems to be a small house on the edge of the forest, but inside it leads to a “natural” bathing pool surrounded by forestry. The building divides into two sections, male and female, and a tall wooden wall divides the first part of the spring for privacy, but if you wade out a ways the wall ends and males and females can intermingle.
STABLES
There are stables filled with horses of excellent breeding, in case any resident might want to go for a ride. There used to be chocobos here, but Bloodspill ate the last ones. The stables are currently being tended to by Link and Daine.
STAGE/THEATER
An open air stage/theater set up by Romeo and various other members of the castle. At the far end of a field, it is well set up for people to either watch performances from folded up chairs or from on the grass. It's worth noting that they have an amazing light and fog show.
THE CAVES
The remnants of the underground caves Toph built during Nelo Angelo’s assault on Cair Paradisa and the town, some time ago. While it was used as a safe haven for residents and townspeople alike at the time, they fell into disuse when the attack ended. Now, other than broken and sliced up chunks of steel left over from a brief (and bloody) stint as a prison, it stands empty.
Originally built by Star Tyrian, run by Tres Iquis. The shooting range is a small section of cleared area off the woods. It has a clubhouse, two rifle ranges, one pistol range and an archery range. There is a transformed obstacle course that now serves as a closed off paintball field. There is access to a marked archery course that runs through the woods, which can double as a free-range wooded paintball field. When the original owners were sent home it sat abandoned and open to the public. Ruby, a resident in the castle, has since cleaned up the place and brought it back to operational order. It is a check-in facility now, requiring that you sign-in and sign-out to avoid people being shot and left behind in the fields.
LIFE IN THE CASTLE Edit
The castle is usually home to a calm, pleasant atmosphere, something that helps new residents adjust quite comfortably to the pace of things. While there is always something going on somewhere, it is full of quiet lulls that often act as the “calm before the storm.” The castle is a perfect harmony; while it is predictable, no one ever knows what it’ll do next, and residents are usually on their toes.
Residents are tended to by the staff, a seemingly infinite number of ghosts that live in the castle. The ghosts do not speak, are extremely swift and obedient, and they aim to please. Appearance-wise, they are odd; while they look like people, it seems as though they have no discernible facial features, physical traits, or even genders. They are unremarkable, completely forgettable, and completely without individual identities. Generally the ghosts spend time in the kitchens and dining room, but if summoned they will go wherever they are asked to go. Task-wise, they will cook, clean, complete menial tasks, and run errands.
On occasion, the castle will make large changes, most of them temporary, such as a world change or some sort of major event. Usually when the world changes there is a resident who knows that world as their home world. Major events may be anything from a full-fledged zombie attack to giving all residents a personality change, or a baby to care for. Residents never quite know what to expect.
Date Edit
Residents in the castle are very aware of the current date, mostly because of holidays that act as marking points for their year. It is unclear which year is is. On occasion the castle will transform to a certain point of time in history (ie: during the New York plot it was November 2008) this year does not directly correlate with the castle.
As residents come from any time-line and any date, time, century, era, etc., it's impossible to pinpoint a year.
Holidays Edit
The castle typically only celebrates Christmas, the New Year, Halloween and Valentine's Day. It has different events each year and may or may not decorate.
Residents typically educate non-Earth residents about the holidays they don't know about.
Some speculate on why the castle has chosen these holidays, but the general consensus is that Earth is a very popular planet on Paradisa, and as a result, it tries to cater to the masses.
Wishes Edit
The castle itself is benevolent, as well. Many things asked for will be granted to a resident, simply by directly asking the castle aloud. Sometimes the item will just materialize nearby, and other times ghosts will deliver it.
However, the castle tends to be picky with wishes. It grants almost any wish that is harmless, necessary, or insignificant. It draws the line at items that can cause massive damage, such as explosives or destructive vehicles, but curiously, it will still give out the materials to construct such things from scratch.
The castle grants a lot of wishes, but what residents don’t know is that EVERYTHING in the castle is borrowed from elsewhere. When a resident wishes for a live animal or creature, it is actually being pulled from another world, similar to a resident would be –– only time isn’t stopped for them. Food, furniture, decorations, weapons, materials all work the same; the castle merely “borrows” it from another world.
Next time you lose your keys, or misplace your favourite shirt, or your cat wanders off for a bit, or even just wonder where something went, think about it.
No one has examined this phenomenon, and even if they did, they would be unable to conclude anything by it.
If in doubt over whether the castle will grant something, ask these questions:
Does the resident intend to use it to harm others, for any reason? Castle's not down with that.
Is it a significant or large vehicle? These require mod permission, and are only granted at the end of world change plots or during special occasions.
Can it cause massive damage? Cause your own damage.
Does the item in question exist? If it doesn’t exist somewhere, the castle can’t obtain it.
Does it have a name? The resident has to know what they want. A vague “a metal that can’t be bent” isn’t specific enough.
